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The weight of the entire, expectant music industry has come to rest this Tuesday upon the shoulders of 23-year-old Toronto native Aubrey Drake Graham.

It’s an impossible situation for the young rapper and singer, who will never sell as many records as his supporters want him to — mentor and Young Money label boss Lil’ Wayne recently said from prison that “I need him to do two million the first week, straight up” — and will always sell too many for his many haters to accord him proper hip-hop credibility.

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Thing is, Drake’s got about as much underground cred as an aspiring rap superstar could possibly hope for, having stormed the pop charts and the Grammy Awards during the past year without actually having a proper album or any kind of concentrated label push behind him. He’s reached this unlikely level of notoriety the old-fashioned way, by putting tunes out there that people like, plain and simple. People liked these songs so much, in fact, they bought up half a million copies of 2009’s free “mix tape,” So Far Gone, when Universal Motown repackaged it for “official” sale as an EP last year. As Drake succinctly puts it on “Show Me A Good Time,” one of the many ambiguous appraisals of his sudden fame to be found on his long-awaited debut, Thank Me Later: “Any way you put it, bitch, I made it.”

It’s revealing of how fast popular culture moves these days that Thank Me Later is, in large part, a first album about the sorts of doubts, excesses, betrayals and creeping paranoid suspicions that arrive hand-in-hand with celebrity. Time was, you’d have to taste the high life that came with at least one massive hit record to get to that stuff, but Drake is all over it from the outset. “My 15 minutes started an hour ago,” he pronounces glumly early in the first track, “Fireworks,” and spends the next hour worrying why he’s not as happy as he should be. He’s swimming in money, he’s got a different girl in his bed every night and he’s been crowned the heir apparent to the global hip-hop throne, yet throughout Thank Me Later all the trappings of (ahem) young money fail to fill the gnawing emptiness that’s repeatedly laid bare in Drake’s confessional, pathologically self-analytical lyrics. “What am I doing?” he wonders amidst a blur of wild nights out on “Over,” fretting that “I know too many people here right now that I didn’t know last year.” His answer doesn’t sound like a boast, more like resignation: “Oh, that’s right / I’m doing me.”

So, yeah, Thank Me Later is a much more interesting record than detractors who figure Drake for another former child actor moonlighting as a pop star might admit. Is it the Second Coming of Jay-Z or Eminem, though? Not quite.

Drake’s a decent MC, but he’s a better singer. He is, in many respects, his own “hook girl” on the more rap-focused tracks here and the obligatory guest rapper enlisted to drop a verse into the ones where his R&B vocal skills are pushed to the forefront. Thank Me Later thus stands out a bit because of the ease with which its author can flit between a reasonably nimble rhymed verse and, more often than not, a glorious chorus designed to melt the ladies’ hearts. “Karaoke” and the seven-minute pseudo-piano ballad “Shut It Down,” in particular, should cement the kid’s success with the ladies for months to come.

It’s only when a guest like T.I., Jay-Z or Lil’ Wayne himself turns up on the microphone and dances circles around him that Drake sounds like a kid a bit out of his depth. And props to the guy for bringing his two longtime producers, Boi-1da and Noah “40” Shebib, along for 90 percent of what could easily have been a big-budget A-list free-for-all. Everyone relies a bit too much on the same snail-paced, synth-washed format for the album to sustain interest right to the end, but when it’s popping — as on Boi-1da’s sinister “Up All Night” or 40’s gargantuan, rattling “Light Up” (featuring Jay-Z) — there’s every reason to believe Drake’s going to be at this game for awhile.

TOP TRACK: “Karaoke.” Not really a rap tune at all, just a rather lovely, sad ballad.

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